Let’s dive in and make sure you didn’t miss a single enhancement of your Ecwid store!

Ecwid team is having a productive winter afternoon in San Diego

New Shipping Method and Improved Shipping Calculations

The new shipping features are Order pickup and dimensional shipping calculations.

New shipping method: order pickup

You can offer in-store pickup if you have a retail shop, a pop-up store, a partner with brick and mortar store or if you sell on the local flea market.

In-store pickup saves you expenses on shipping and at the same time makes checkout faster for your customers, as they don’t have to enter their shipping address.

This is how customers can select in-store pickup locations at the checkout

In your Ecwid store, you can set up several locations for in-store pickup to let your customers choose the one they are most comfortable with. You’ll also want to provide terms of pickup. Your Ecwid store will let you specify them.

Orders for in-store pickup have a special status, Ready for Pickup, in your orders list that makes managing convenient for you. When you change the order status to Ready for Pickup, your customers will receive an email notification so that they know it’s time to come and pick up their orders. You can customize the email template and design it in your brand style.

Dimensional shipping rates

With the help of our new dimensional shipping rates, you can now enter dimensions — the length, width, and height — for each product in your store and get more accurate carrier-calculated shipping rates.

This feature will work for you if you are using FedEx, UPS, USPS, Australia Post, Brasil Correios, and Canada Post to calculate shipping rates in real time.

Enabling dimensional shipping rates means you won’t have to overpay for bigger, lightweight items or small items which can be combined and put into one shipping box. Your shipping costs will be calculated regarding the best possible package.

More Tools For Your Store Design

With Ecwid, you can change your store design as much as you want: use ready-made themes or create your own.

This time we have added more opportunities for simple, quick, and useful modifications of your store design that you can set up without extra help and without leaving your control panel. Let’s look closer.

New design page

If you want to change your Ecwid store design, the new design page in your Control Panel → Settings → Design will lead you through all the ways to customize your Ecwid store’s look.

Here you can:

Check out what theme is active in your store now and edit it.

Get ready-made themes and create custom ones.

Set theme options: those are the most frequently used settings that customize your store’s look within a couple of clicks.

There’s a number of ways to change your storefront look with these options

Ecwid can adapt the colors of your store to your website theme. Depending on your site builder, it can be done as follows:

New Versions of Ecwid Mobile App for iOS and Android

We’ve released a new version of our Android app. It now has a dashboard with store stats and the updates from the Ecwid blog to help you get fresh e-commerce tips.

Ecwid Mobile for iOS now has support for Square readers in the US and Canada, support for PayPal Here wireless readers in the US and the UK, featuring contactless payments (including Apple Pay) in the UK.

In both Ecwid apps (for iOS and Android) you can simply scan a product’s UPC (Universal Product Code) to create an order. This tool will also let you find an order you need: scan the UPC to get the order on the screen.

Last but not least: you can now create, rename, and hide your product categories right within the app (both iOS and Android)! This is a great feature to manage your store on-the-go, without turning to your computer.

New Payment Methods

The more payment methods you offer to your customers, the higher the odds they’ll purchase from you. We know that, and that’s why Ecwid integrated with Square Payments and POS for Australia and PayPal Here for the UK, to help you provide seamless omnichannel selling.

Ecwid’s integration with Square Payments and POS (Australia)

Square Payments, POS, and mPOS let you set up shop anywhere, so whether you have a brick-and-mortar store or you’re running a pop-up shop or booth, you can serve shoppers and take payments easily.

At the same time, Ecwid gives you all the tools for selling online: on your website, on social sites such as Facebook, on mobile, as well as on marketplaces such as eBay and Google Shopping.

Together, Ecwid and Square work to sync your offline and online sales in real time and go truly omnichannel.

With Ecwid and Square, offline and online sales are synchronized in real time

New Version of Ecwid Plugin for WordPress

By this time, there are more updates to the Ecwid plugin for WordPress, but we’ll tell you about those that took place this winter. For later updates, please visit wordpress.org.

Integration with WordPress search

Your website search will now find store products among other site pages and posts. It means that when your customer searches for something on your site, they will see both site content and store products in the search results and will be able to navigate directly to the product pages from there.

In order to activate this feature, enable it on the Ecwid/Advanced settings page in your WordPress backend and do not forget to click on the Synchronize products link.

New Buy Now button in the WordPress post and page editor

Now you have a useful and easy tool to place a product from your store on any page or post on your site.

Just open any post or page in your WordPress admin panel, click the Add product button in the editor, select the product you want to see on that page, and click Insert — an Ecwid Buy Now button will appear on that page after you publish the changes.

Add Product Button lets you quickly add a product from your Ecwid store to any page

New Weld Integration

Weld is a relatively new player among site builders. If you are thinking of creating a website, consider this flexible, mobile-friendly site builder tool.

It uses smart objects and content blocks to help you create interactive, dynamic websites. You aren’t limited by the number of pages or pre-existing template designs. You can even use it entirely for free provided you keep the Made in Weld watermark.

API Updates

This section will be useful for developers who create customized Ecwid solutions for their clients and for Ecwid merchants who were looking for ways to create custom discounts and enable SEO-friendly URLs for their custom-built websites.

Apply custom discounts

We added a way for developers to apply custom discounts to an order when the customer is at the checkout stage. Ecwid will be sending current cart details, and based on that information, an app can apply discounts to that cart. This opens up possibilities like:

Buy one, get one free (BOGOF)

Local customer discount

Limited-time discounts and more.

Enable SEO URLs for custom-built websites

We have introduced a new, SEO-friendly URL format, for the URLs generated by Ecwid. Now any store owner with their own website can enable it for their store using the documentation for better visibility on search engines.

We also added a new event for Ecwid JavaScript API — OnOrderPlaced. It allows you to get order details in your storefront right after a customer has placed an order using JavaScript. It’s a useful feature for tracking promo offers and general store stats.